Ã Cannot remember which article it was that said, even though we're using semantic mark-up we should add in the ARIA roles for older AT that does not support the new semantic mark-up, since it does no harm, as the role is still the same.
My guess would be that if an AT doesn't support the nav element it might not support the role of navigation either. The possible benefit would be from older browsers like IE 7 or 8 where an HTML5 element might not be supported by the browser put perhaps the AT is newer and might pull from the DOM the ARIA role, e.g. with a newer version of JAWS like 14+.
So as Steve said you shouldn't do it - but there could be edge cases where it might provide benefits - IMO you'd want to test those and only add when needed to provide accessibility support.
Jonathan
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Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
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From: Oscar Cao [mailto:oscar.cao@live.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 11:40 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: What's everyone's view on backwards-support, etc for ARIA
Hello
Just skimming through the draft for ARIA in HTML<https://specs.webplatform.org/html-aria/webspecs/master/> and I noticed it says web devs shouldn't use ARIA ROLES to specify the role of an element which already has that role implied via its native semantics. E.g. <nav role="navigation"></nav>
Cannot remember which article it was that said, even though we're using semantic mark-up we should add in the ARIA roles for older AT that does not support the new semantic mark-up, since it does no harm, as the role is still the same.
So what's everyone on this mailing lists' point of view on this?
Regards
Oscar